Unfortunately, it is I had expected. Performance is a total crap! Read it for details!

I'd just like to ask you... WHAT TOOK ASPYR SO LONG, SINCE THE PERFORMANCE IS THAT CRAP?

What were they trying to do so many months? To increase performance? What performance? Even on a G5 Dual 2 Gbytes RAM and 9600XT the game reaches 15 fps, imagine how bad it would be at G4 systems. So what did aspyr actually do for the mac port so many months?

In other words, they were to lazy to build multi-processor support for the Mac.

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No they choose to put the time and money else where to a more imporant task. There are Very few multi processor out there. 2nd the gains are very limited compare to what the same amount of time that would be put else where.

Got to love how everyone is going to whin because they choose to spend the time doing something more imporanted in the port.

No they choose to put the time and money else where to a more imporant task. There are Very few multi processor out there. 2nd the gains are very limited compare to what the same amount of time that would be put else where.

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I would guess a lot of Mac users who expect to play Doom 3 have a dual processor system.

* Aspyr got the game out, and it's solid. Just like BF1942 and MacSoft's UT2004, later patches optimized the code and fixed minor issues, I'm sure we'll see the same here, regarding optimization, 5.1, etc. Would you rather have waited until Dec 2005?

* DP support was rejected even by id Software, as not really providing much of a benefit. Even UT2004 only offloads audio only.

* True CPU usage can be seen by disabling 3D rendering, such as in the MacWorld benchmarks of last week. We'll post a followup on this, trying to separate the two. Also, Rob-ART Morgan of barefeats.com will be on this soon, and his results are extremely thorough.

* Framerate and "Feel" are often two different things. The reviewer had both a high end PC gaming rig as well as several Macs, and indicated the "feel" was good on the Mac side, even when directly comparing to D3 on his PC rig.

* He wanted to give you a wide range of possible macs-- note the middle Mac had only 512M memory. Take the given rigs, and your likely resolution, and you can reasonably extrapolate your performance. To me, something like 10 FPS is unplayable, 18-25 can be enjoyable (depending on the game, and D3 seems to fit the bill), and 30+ for competitive clanning.

* We'll try to post some followups before the release, which may include short movies of in-game play on a Mac.

Looking at the Powermac scores with the single G5 1.8 and fx5200 it appears it will be almost unplayable unless everything is off and at 640 x 480. Not good. This will go for the new iMacs as well. Below 30 fps and you have lag and skipping to me thats very annoying. Good article that gives us a good idea what to expect still a little shocked but i think most Macfans have gotten use to this. Guess thats why i bought a PC after 20 years of Macs. im a slow learner. At least it will be on Mac.

I just wanted to say there might be too much emphasis on the timedemo benchmarks. This is my reply from the Doom3 now Gold thread:

Even though the benchmarks are reporting the game may be just barely playable, seems like in-game that's not the case:

Peter Cohen of MacCentral in his IMG post said:

I actually answered this in the article. To save you the clickthrough, what I said was that the demo really tasks the computer, and it returned frame rates pretty consistently lower than what I experienced actually playing the game.

I spent most of my time playtesting Doom 3 at 10 x 7 or 12 x 10, and saw very playable framerates. There were slowdowns here and there -- particularly when I'd hit new parts of maps and the game had to hit the disk for more info -- but most of the time it rarely dipped out of the 40s.

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So, I say play it and then see what happens. Not that I'm expecting things to be great, but probably better than these numbers.

When enabling SMP on my computer I see an increase of over 100FPS in Quake 3, about a 30%-35% performance increase.

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Again the question goes back to HOW many daul Processor macs are out there comepared to none Daul processor. Yeah next to none. The gains made in Daul processor support would of been mostly wasted time and effort for the most part since very few people could even use it.
The gains are limited due to the fact apple piss poor driver support that lag a year or more behind the PC drivers. They choose to put there money and time to better use. But no the mac people are going ot complain because no daul processor support but then most of then whining about it dont have a daul processor computer that could run it.

guys,
the performance of a mac running doom3 is comparable to a pc (at the same clockspeed & graphics card. the tester in the above link used a 9600xt graphics card for the mac. for the record, the 9600 series cards only have 4 pipelines, while the nvidia in the pc has 8 pipelines (its also pci-e). the nvidia (or any other 8-pipeline card) will process 2x as much data than the 9600's. so, if u put a 3.0ghz G5 mac (which doesnt exist yet) with a radeon x800xt against a 3.0 ghz pc with a similar graphics card, you will get much closer numbers. i'll bet the PC will still edge out the mac, but not like these numbers. that test wasnt fair. the 9600 could never keep up to the 6600. and there was a 1.4ghz difference in cpu speeds (3.4ghz penitum4 vs. 2.0 ghz G5). of course the pc will destroy the mac.

i have an idea, lets take a 2.5ghz G5 with a radeon x800xt and a 2.0ghz PC with a 9600xt and see who comes out on top. and lets test them at 1680x1050 resolution too.

guys,
the performance of a mac running doom3 is comparable to a pc (at the same clockspeed & graphics card. the tester in the above link used a 9600xt graphics card for the mac. e the pc will destroy the mac.

i have an idea, lets take a 2.5ghz G5 with a radeon x800xt and a 2.0ghz PC with a 9600xt and see who comes out on top. and lets test them at 1680x1050 resolution too.

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Good point.

The X800 has in fact been benchmarked last week by MacWorld. However, I would posit that the majority of Mac users considering buying Doom3 do not own an X800xt/GF 6800 Ultra. Given the MacWorld and Macologist numbers, you should be able to estimate where your framerate will lie, at least for the initial retail version before subsequent optimization patches.

Also we expect thorough benchmarking results of all configurations by Rob-ART Morgan of barefeats.com, in a continuation to his mac vs pc article here and here. Especially interesting to note are his comments on AGP vs PCI-express in the Mac: : "5. PCI-Express has a theoretical bus speed four times that of 8X AGP, but I postulate that the bandwidth advantage is under utilized. The current generation of graphics cards and motherboard designs don't even saturate a 4X AGP bus.".

At any rate, we'll have more benchmark data coming in for various configurations soon, Aspyr has just started shipping out review copies, so this is just the tip of the iceberg. The PC rig had to be a good one, or else all the PC fans would be complaining that we handicapped the PC to make the Mac look good. I'll try to look for a D3 benchmark using a similar vidcard as the Mac today.

* Most Mac owners considering buying the game don't own either card. A review that was only a x800 vs 6800ultra shootout would not be relevant for these people.

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The Mac owners expecting to be able to run Doom 3 decently probably have made some sort of upgrade to their PowerMac G5 by now (grfx card or RAM).
Especially the Rev A owners who could only choose between a GeForce 5200 (absolute nog-go), Radeon 9600 Pro (64 MB VRAM - better choice than the 5200, but still not a gr8 card), or Radeon 9800 Pro (lower clocked 9800 Retail, 128 MB VRAM for a huge price) would have been tempted to get the first next-gen grfx card available: The nVidia GeForce 6800.
Half a year later the X800 arrived, and I wonder how many have been sold: More or less than the GeForce?

I know not many would have either of these cards, but the MacWorld tests were done on the X800 with some disappointing results. I just wonder if their Dual 2.5 GHz (how many have this Mac??) with Radeon X800 XT really is the best Doom 3 Mac out there.
I believe not.

On a positive note, the article suggested that this is the graphics engine that Id will go with for the next three or four Dooms. The first three releases were all on the original engine with minor tweaks.

So as computers get replaced, the game will be more and more managable. The article also hinted that this incarnation of the games engine will be around for a long time.

I'll be getting this release for my Xbox, it sounds as though it will run better on that and my iMac can't match a 55" big screen.

i have an idea, lets take a 2.5ghz G5 with a radeon x800xt and a 2.0ghz PC with a 9600xt and see who comes out on top

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Anandtech has benchmarks with a 9600xt on a PC (AMD Athlon 64 FX53, oc to 2.6GHz), so you can compare the results with the MacWorld X800 Mac benchmarks. In fact the anandtech article is very thorough and goes over everything from high end cards to the low end, and ditto with CPUs, and gauges the effect of the CPU (nothing that the game is often GPU-limited).

i kno the mac graphic cards have poor drivers, but why do pcs pretty much always destroy macs? is it to do more with clock cycles than to math done per a cycle?
Whereas a 2.0G5 9600xt would beat pretty much any pcs at head to head editing and after effects work.

i kno the mac graphic cards have poor drivers, but why do pcs pretty much always destroy macs? is it to do more with clock cycles than to math done per a cycle?
Whereas a 2.0G5 9600xt would beat pretty much any pcs at head to head editing and after effects work.

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The reason why this game is running 'slowly' has nothing to do with the G5. It all comes down to graphics drivers/cards.

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